Is the debugger in Mednafen even usable? All I could do was display some hex data, I had no idea how to interact with it.

Had to use MESS with the built in MAME debugger, which wasn't exactly helpful, since it's designed around the multi machine idea, without the advantages you'd have with given knowledge of the console's architecture - Also, it's pretty much a textbook example of a hostile and annnoying UI, that makes even simple actions a complex mess.

Oh yeah! I feel like an idiot for not giving Mesen's debugger a try earlier.It basically does everything I've ever wanted and more. Super friendly interface that makes everything easy, good overview of every register, automatically breaking up code into useful blocks, allows editing of ROM data directly via the current address window, and even editing entire code blocks using assembly opcodes.

Big, BIG proprs to Sour! This is what every emulator's debugger should be like. If there had been a PCE emulator with the same bells and whistles, my work would have been a billion times easier.

Yeah there are so many things Mesen does right, but it's not a PC Engine emulator *confused*.

Mednafen is very unintuitive to use at all (unlike MAME) but AFAIK it's the only accurate PC Engine emulator there is so far, so we have to use it if we hope to make any PC Engine homebrew. Magic Engine and Ootake are really mostly only good for playing retail games with.

An Everdrive, CD-R discs and a Duo-R/RX is the best for real hardware testing though.

Eh, Mesen is a mixture of native code and CLR code, and the CLR code is mostly there for the GUI and filesystem stuff. I'm going to have a hard time buying an argument that it's meaningfully worse than GTK3.

Mono, Wine, GTK, Qt, Tk, Motif, GNUstep, XForms, FLTK, SDL, Xaw, all are ultimately toolkits that run over X. This means a Mono application is no less "native" on an X11/Linux distribution than, say, a Qt application is on an X11/Linux distribution whose desktop environment uses GTK.

Each to their own. I don't consider CLR/JVM/insert-bloated-virtual-platform-with-far-too-many-dependencies-here to be "native" to any given OS, unless it's a part of the OS itself. It's "meaningfully worse" than GTK3 because I already have that and use it for other things, while Mono is a ton of extra downloads/updates/bugs/configuration headaches/security holes/disk space with no other purpose.

Don't get me wrong, Mesen is awesome. I'm just fed up with every other app I want to use dragging 400 MB of crap along with it.

That's a bit of a predicament whenever Microsoft produces extremely good software, which has happened a lot. I can see why you wouldn't want to support them, but then again I can't see them as worse than pretty much any other large corporation I'd be supporting by buying almost any product nowadays.

Thanks! Feel free to let me know if you have any comments about the debugging tools, too.

Rahsennor wrote:

I'm just fed up with every other app I want to use dragging 400 MB of crap along with it.

This is essentially a tradeoff between development speed/simplicity and disk space. Any software could be written to use little to no dependencies, but it will probably take an order of magnitude more time to get the same end result. Mesen's GUI was originally written w/ the Win32 API directly, but getting even the simplest of things working was prohibitively time consuming. Obviously, QT and other solutions would have been better than Win32's API, but as I am not familiar with any of them, it would still have been a lot more time consuming on my end.

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